Negative attributes of Israeli society that are found in every society on earth are treated as if such negatives were peculiar to Israel. Such obsessive and prejudicial singling out of Israel is, as Lawrence Summers, the former President of Harvard University put it, ‘anti-Semitic in their effect if not necessarily in their intent.'”
At a time when many have begun to use a new yardstick for defining anti-Israel activity, parsing out anti-Israel activity from anti-Semitic activity and declaring the first one acceptable seems wrong.
There can certainly be legitimate criticism of Israel, but Natan Sharansky‘s metric: the 3 Ds – Demonization, Delegitimization and Double Standards – to determine whether criticism of Israel crosses the line into simply another form of hatred of Jews – in this case, the Jewish State, qua Jewish, seems more useful.
Turning again to ZOA’s Tuchman, who points out that even the U.S. government uses a standard broader than the one suggested in the ADL report.
Most of the anti-Israelism that’s being reported to us is anti-Semitism. Programs and speakers are demonizing Israel using factual distortions and outright lies. They’re calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. And with all the horrific human rights abuses committed by regimes around the world, the BDS movement on campuses focuses its rage and condemnation on Israel alone. All of this is anti-Semitism, according to the standards that our own government uses.
By whatever standard is used, there is little doubt that the problem of orchestrated anti-Israel activity on U.S. campuses is growing and needs to be taken seriously.
And it is not a new phenomenon. As long ago as 2009, after spending two weeks on a speaking tour of North American colleges, Arab Israeli journalist Khaled abu Toameh had this to say about the anti-Israel climate on those campuses: “there is more sympathy for Hamas there than in Ramallah.”